Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

Through the doorway of a tavern—a couple of sad-drunk infantrymen dancing in the jukebox glow, each alone, chins down, fingers popping, shoulders working, heads bobbing, trudging like carriage horses toward some solitary destiny. She stopped to watch them. In the songs on jukeboxes or on radios tuned to AFVN she often heard God calling out to her—”Love me with all your heart” —”This guy’s in love with you” — “All you need is love”—but tonight the voice sang only to the soldiers, and its message didn’t reach the street.

She passed a recruit with his head hanging, one hand guiding his stream against the wall. He raised acid-bright eyes to her and said, “I been pissing for a thousand years.” His friend beside him was bent over puking. “Don’t mind me, ma’am,” he said, “I’m high on life.”

The Vietnamese were restful to her eyes. She had no background with them. The American soldiers seemed far too much like Canadians—pulling her heart out in an undertow of joy and sorrow, guilt, anger, and affection. She watched the broad backs of these two as they tottered away from her.

They threw hand grenades through doorways and blew the arms and legs off ignorant farmers, they rescued puppies from starvation and smuggled them home to Mississippi in their shirts, they burned down whole villages and raped young girls, they stole medicines by the jeepload to save the lives of orphans.

The next morning in the offices of the World Children’s Services Colin Rappaport said to her, “Kathy. Please. Let me find you a bed in one of the hospitals.”

“This isn’t the conversation I came here to have.”

“Do you realize the shape you’re in? You’re exhausted.”

“But if I don’t feel tired, it doesn’t count.”

“But you realize.” “I realize,” she said, “but I don’t feel tired.”

A t the start of February, James Houston, in his dirty jungle fatigues, caught a ride with a water truck from Good Luck Mountain down to Highway Thirteen and then with a jeep into Saigon. He could have stopped—had meant to stop—at the big base to look in on Sergeant Harmon at the Twelfth Evacuation Hospital. But the boys in the truck were heading all the way, and he simply stayed aboard.

The sarge, very soon, as soon as they got him to the point he could be moved without killing him, would be taken to Japan. If James wanted to visit him, he’d better do it now. This according to Black Man. According to Black Man the sarge was seriously hurt, hurt permanently. Something big and possibly from their own side had hit him from close range, hit him square in the belly, above his pelvis, and Black Man had promised James he wouldn’t like what he’d see.

From a vendor on Thi Sach Street James bought a stick of chewing gum and a fake Marlboro cigarette. His second tour had entered its third day. He was sober, AWOL, and virtually broke.

James’s two friends Fisher and Evans had shipped out the day before. Tall, chip-toothed Fisher had shaken James’s hand and said, “Remember our first night here?”

“The Floor Show.”

“Remember the Floor Show?”

“I sure do.”

“Remember that first time getting laid at the Purple Bar?”

“I sure do.”

“When the world ends, and Jesus comes down in a cloud of glory and all that shit, it’ll be the second most incredible thing that ever happened to me. Because I will remember that night at the Purple Bar.”

They embraced one another, and James put all his concentration into damming back the tears. They all swore to meet again. James assumed they never would.

In the Cozy Bar on Thi Sach James bummed another cigarette from an airman who revealed he was a Cherokee Indian and the descendant of chiefs and who refused James a second cigarette and seemed on the brink of ditching him until James, finally taking the stool beside him, rearranged the gun under his shirt, at which point the airman said, “What’s that there?”

“It’s for tunnels.” “For tunnels?” “Thirty-eight automatic. Got me a suppressor back at camp.” “Do you mean like a silencer?” “Yep. Christ almighty—what smells like gasoline in here?” “I pump jet fuel all day long.” “Is it you?” “I don’t smell it no more myself.” “Whoo. You’re making me dizzy. Buy me a beer, would you, please?” “No can do. You know, there’s a jeweler right on Thi Sach. I sold him

a forty-five this morning.” “He buys weapons?” “I sold him a forty-five.” “You think he’d like a thirty-eight?” “I bet he would.” “I bet I know where he can get one.” That afternoon, drunk, AWOL, flush with Vietnamese piasters on

the smelly street—odor after odor and the hiss of frying gunk—James stopped at a shop and bought himself some imitation Levi’s denims and a red T-shirt and a shiny yellow tour jacket illustrated with a naked woman that said “Saigon 1968.” It was far too hot for such a jacket, but he wore it anyway because it put him in an excellent mood. He bought two packs of real U.S. Marlboros and got a haircut from a street barber— he’d never had his hair cut anywhere but at the big base, but he was drunk enough to try something different—and afterward purchased a pair of flimsy blue-black loafers. He changed in the street while people very carefully didn’t look at him, and carried his fatigues in a brown paper shopping bag with string handles.

He thought he’d better get sober before he went to see the sarge, and before he got sober he’d better get drunker. Around eleven that night he bartered with a cyclo driver to get him to a cheap hotel in the Cho Lon District, but somewhere en route they revolutionized the plan and instead traveled in the unsafe hours of darkness nearly sixty miles to the shores of the China Sea and to a whorehouse James had heard of called Frenchie’s, a place with its own legend. At two in the morning they reached it, a scattering of shacks near a fishing village. He woke up a papasan napping on the bartop in the café who understood a little English and could guess the rest, and who, when James asked, “Are you Frenchie?” said, “Frenchie coming,” but Frenchie didn’t come. No exterior lights. He heard no generator. Saw no girls anywhere. No other GIs. Nor anyone else at all. The melancholy old papasan led him by flashlight to a bungalow no better than a hooch in a row of several just like it. Somebody else’s pubic hairs dotted his bedding. He stripped off the sheet. The thin mattress was stained, but the stains looked less recent than the pubic hair. For this room, including a battery-powered bedside fan, he was paying about a dollar a night. He didn’t bother letting the net down. He didn’t see any mosquitoes.

In the glow of a kerosene lantern he found his clasp knife and almost cut away the legs of his fatigues; but thought better of it and shortened his fake Levi’s instead. By the time he turned in, his drunk had become a hangover.

He rose around noon and went to the sand-speckled café, where a woman served him an omelet, hot tea, and a small baguette. Then he told her to bring him the same thing all over again, only with a beer, no tea.

He wasn’t the only customer. A one-legged GI in cutoff jeans and rip-sleeved fatigue shirt, a towhead with sunburned flesh and aviator sunglasses, sat a couple tables away drinking beer and eating nothing, most of the time holding a nine-millimeter pistol with his thumb on the ejector button, dropping the butt of the clip into the palm of his hand and slapping it back in, ejecting it, slapping it back in.

“We all die,” he said. “I’ll die high.”

James didn’t like this at all and got up and left.

He headed for the low seawall and the rumbling shore. The beach was narrow and the sand was brown. He sat on the rock wall and smoked a cigarette and watched a drowned rooster rolling in the surf. This wasn’t the Frenchie’s everybody talked about. Everybody said Frenchie sold only 33 beer—that much seemed correct—and also Spanish Fly. Also girls—but they were peasants—but they were girls. And everybody said there were Old West-style gunfights out front almost every night. And said the cyclo drivers never went near there after dark, or their little machines would be commandeered for races up and down the beach and usually out into the sea.